Jolicloud Wants to be your Other Linux OS - page 2

Versatile Installer

December 21, 2009

By
Paul Ferrill

You'll see a notification icon in the top right-hand corner
of the screen whenever system updates are available. You can choose to proceed
with the install or ignore the message till later. The "My Jolicloud Dashboard"
screen provides another way to update your system on demand. Clicking on the
Updates tab of the Dashboard screen will show you if any updates are ready to
be installed. You can also check out a list of transactions completed with the
Jolicloud service using the History tab.

figure 3

When Offline

When you install one of the Google apps like Gmail or Google
Reader you automatically get Google Gears as well. This makes it possible to
use these apps when offline. You will have to remember to do the sync thing to
keep your offline and online activities in step. Other cloud apps like Facebook
or Twitter will obviously not work when you don't have an Internet connection.

The App Directory does include a good selection of traditional
applications like OpenOffice, The Gimp, VLC and Wine for running Windows
applications. As of this writing the App Directory has 435 applications
available to install. The GNOME Terminal is available should you feel the need
to install some other application. Jolicloud Pre-Beta is based on Ubuntu Jaunty
(9.04) so any application compatible with that release should, in theory, work.

Bottom Line

We really only found a few things to complain about with
Jolicloud. We couldn't get the Nautilus file browser to open up the network tab
to browse for files on our server. We're not sure why, but the app would just
close when you click on the network icon. The other nit was the screen
brightness when coming out of hibernate mode. That one goes away with a couple
of key strokes so it's not really a big deal.

Overall this distro is pretty slick. It generally succeeds
on the stated goal of delivering a Linux version that's easy to install and
works well either as a replacement for your original Netbook OS or alongside.
With the extensive list of supported Netbooks, it should prove to be a winner. You
have no more excuses if you're looking for a solid Netbook OS without the
Windows baggage.